Much has changed since I wrote my Masters Thesis in Folklore on political pranks in 2000. Much has changed, I should say, in the world of politics and in the world of pranks. In many ways, things have become substantially less funny.

My thesis, with its requisite three chapters of research, looked at the pranks performed by Earth First!, the Biotic Baking Brigade, and the Eugene Anarchists for Torrey. It's the latter, primarily that inspired the essay, excerpted below the fold, that I delivered at the Culture and the State conference at the University of Alberta in 2003 where I participated in a panel alongside several other anarchist scholars (yes, there is more than one of us). My argument at the time was that pranks enact a ritualized inversion of power. This, alongside the laughs they elicit, made pranks a powerful tool when undertaken by activists, particularly when they helped to subvert the prevailing notion of radicals as violent terrorists.

The Eugene anarchists in particular were facing not only media condemnation but government suppression, following a series of riots in Eugene and their alleged role in property damage at the Seattle WTO protests. The mainstream media had flocked to the town to interview the black-clad radicals - The New York Times, CNN, 60 Minutes, even Spin and Rolling Stone Magazine. The hubbub was fueled in part by the local mayor, Jim Torrey, who apologized that his town had become a "hotbed" and "major exporter" of anarchy. In response to Torrey, a figure who had long been seen as a friend of corporate interests and an enemy of the environment, some local anarchists responded not with violence but with a prank. In December 1999, the Eugene Anarchists for Torrey (EAT) campaign held a press conference and rally on the steps of City Hall, announcing their active support for the mayor's re-election. Playing on the mayor's own pronouncements, flyers for the event exclaim, "Let's keep Eugene an exporter of Anarchists. Re-elect Jim Torrey! A vote for Torrey is a vote for inevitable anarchy!"

I wish I could have written that the riotous laughter of the Eugene anarchists triumphed and the white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy was overthrown with giggles and snickers and pranks. Instead it feels like the state tried even harder to have "the last laugh," sentencing a local activist to 23-years for setting fire to 3 SUVs - a sentence that symbolized that radical activists still warranted the most heavy-handed suppression in the eyes of the law.

We stopped laughing.

But while Eugene Anarchists for Torrey might have only provided the most temporary of subversions of power, pranksters have not disappeared from political discourse. Sasha Barat Cohen and Stephen Colbert have been extremely successful at mocking and undermining those in power. It may well be that the goals for systemic structural change - the goals of making Eugene not just a "hotbed of anarchy" but a place of anarchy itself - are far too large for pranks. Rather, pranks can merely just be "mind bombs,: unable to overthrow but perfectly capable to unsettle those in power.

Political Pranks: Performing Anarchist Humor

Political scientist David Miller begins his book Anarchism with an entry from a 1957 thesaurus: Violent creature, brute, beast, wild beast; dragon, tiger, wolf, mad dog; demon, devil, hell-hound, fury, monster; savage, barbarian, vandal, iconoclast, destroyer; man of blood, butcher, murderer, homicidal maniac, madman; ruffian, tyrant; fire-eater, fire-brand, agitator, revolutionary, nihilist, terrorist, — anarchist. Undoubtedly many of these references persist to this day, the mention of anarchists and anarchy still conjuring images of insanity, brutality, and death. This paper seeks to trace a somewhat different thread of anarchism, one overlooked by the likes of Roget and his thesaurus, one that counters this stream of analogies that links anarchism solely to violence.

Instead of anarchism as tragedy, I want to examine it as comedy, slapstick comedy—the pie-in-the-face, of course. Here, the anarchist is prankster, trickster, fool, clown, invoking the type of laughter that Mikhail Bakhtin connects to the temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order - the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions (Bakhtin 10). For Bakhtin, this carnival laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always remained a free weapon in their hands (Bakhtin 94). It is this festive, disruptive, and transformative power of laughter that I want to relate to anarchism here.

In particular, I am interested in the prank—the political prank—as a performance of anarchism. Pranks function through ritualized inversion, subverting and sabotaging established power relations. As George Orwell once observed, the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate (Orwell 284). In this anarchic manner, then, pranks seek to undo, to undermine, to ridicule authority, and they have been used to amusing political ends by the likes of the Yippies, Earth First!, the Billboard Liberation Front, and the Biotic Baking Brigade.

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